Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday color supplement beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest recurring-character newspaper strips. This page — titled 'Buster Brown and Tige Acquire a Couple of Shirts' — follows the mischievous boy in his broad-brimmed hat and his bulldog Tige through a haberdasher's shop, where a salesman cajoles Buster into trying striped shirts; chaos predictably follows. Nine ink-drawn panels deploy speech balloons, sequential staging, and a closing 'Resolutions' box in which Buster draws a dubious moral. Outcault had already invented the form with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98); here his confident ruled-panel grid and expressive crowd-scene draftsmanship show the visual grammar of comics fully matured, decades before the comic book format collected such pages between covers.